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Fantasy Map Tactics

The evil red science-denier armies are slowly roaming the land looking for blood.

You control three green unarmed bards intent on swiftly spreading the word about science to the Mapletree kingdom.

Capture 15 cities to rule the kingdom while avoiding any bloodshed!

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I've always loved the "fantasy maps" that you find at the beginning of all fantasy novels (LOTR, Game of Thrones, etc). There's something exciting about seeing the map, with all sorts of interesting looking places just begging to be explored. I thought it would be fun to make a turn-based strategy tactics wargame based on this visual style.

I created my game in HTML5 using jquery, because something like this doesn't need 3d rendering performance, and because it is very easy to turn the game into a mobile (android, ios and ouya) app using phonegap.

I started by first drawing some typical fantasy map icons using marker on paper. After scanning in the images and creating a spritesheet, I wrote a simple random map grid creation class. It uses deterministic random procedurally-generated terrain (a seeded mersenne twister PRNG) so that a complex map can be recalled with a single integer seed value (no need to save a huge array to disk/cookie/localstorage). I then add extra water tiles around the edges by varying the shoreline randomly.

Finally, I scatter hamlets, towns, cities, forts and castles in non-blocked tiles and give them random location names by combining two syllables from an array of three-letter strings.

This results in a fantasy book-style map with scattered forests, mountains, hills, swamps, and deserts that hold a plethora of interesting-sounding locations.

Finally, I implemented an A-Star pathfinding algorithm that can navigate a character around obstacles to get to any waypoint on the map (the green and red dots: green is how far you will move in a single turn before running out of "energy").

I also coded a line-of-sight (LOS) algorithm for use in the combat, which means that eventually projectiles and magic spells could be cast in a straight line but would be blocked by mountains or towns. The white dots are tiles that you are able to "see" - but in this version you control peace-loving bards with no attack skills.

HOW TO PLAY:

This game is more like CHESS or a puzzle game than a typical tactics title like Final Fantasy Tactics or Fire Emblem.

Drag with the mouse button held down to scroll the map. You can zoom in and out with the + and - buttons.

If you want to restart with a completely different random map, enter any number into the box in the top left and click the world button.

Your green bards move very fast but die instantly if touched by a red army (unless you are really lucky). The red enemies move very slowly, but you are vastly outnumbered.

Choose which army you want to control by clicking the buttons on the bottom in the middle.

Click the location you want to move to and advance the turn (bottom left button) to start moving.

Great idea! Very few strategy games are as easy to pick up like this one. The graphics and style are great. I had some performance issues, the game lagged a bit for me.

I think the interface can be improved a little, maybe showing your characters on the bottom instead of the next/prev unit buttons. Also when you change units should be clearer which is the active one. I'm kind of amazed you managed to make all this in 48 hours. Strategy games are usually hard to code. Congrats!

Thanks for all the kind words, people! I really struggled to finish on time. I had to scale back many of my ideas: initially I'd hoped to make a full-on tactics game, with various attacks and stats and experience points and all the rest. The "unarmed" insta-death mechanic was born out of time constraints and honestly I think it is a BETTER game because of it!

New players: please keep the comments coming. Your feedback is extremely valuable to me. In particular, I'm open to any suggestions for improvement!

It was fun! I also had some performance issues, but no big deal; it's only js after all. As for improvement ideas I would say: The music is good! Use it more; the game needed more sound in it. Also, I would make the AI more aggressive because it seemed like they moved somewhat randomly.

I'm also impressed you did this in 48h; great job! It's a heck of a great base to make an awesome, really different online game out of. I would definitely keep working on it (and if I knew JS, I'd probably offer to help, but alas, I don't know much past the basics).

This is pretty fun! I cannot win for the life of me though, haha. I got 7 of 15 once, which is decent. It's neat to see someone using html5 too. I love the graphical feel of the parchment and hand drawn map items. It's a great aesthetic :)

The maps are the best thing about the game, I didn't see the purpose in having more than one unit if you can only move one (unless you are intending to add different types of units later), so I spent the time moving the one guy around all the cities. What would look really nice is some roads connecting some of the more major places, they might be quicker to move along but attract enemy armies that want to ambush you. As it is as well as strategy, you could make an awesome RPG from the map as well!

I had an issue where one town in the lake was blocked by a hill or something, cause it to be inaccessible (although it looked like I could get to it from a diagonally adjacent spot, but couldn't). You may have fixed that already in the Jam version.

I really like the art style. For post-compo you should animate the little characters in the same style. I'll also agree that the game does run a bit too slow. This is a good start to something that could be really fun.

This was pretty cool and the map graphics were good, it took me a while to figure out what to do though, I don't know if the game is just supposed to be slow or if it was running laggy on my computer, but it took couple of seconds for any actions to input.

For such a simple game it was surprisingly intense, won on my first try but I was getting nervous when huge red mass just crawls closer turn by turn. It was bit hard to figure out the character movements at first, perhaps you should make the green and red lines more visible.

The game is pretty nice, but I don't really see it anything to do with the theme besides bad guys hating science.

Enthralling stuff. I like to play before reading the comments of others but in this case I wish I hadn't. If I'd understood that I can only move one bard per turn, I would have enjoyed it more. I mistook it for a bug. I wish I could give more suggestions as you asked for in your post above. It's beautiful to look at, the music is appropriate and if you fulfill the other game mechanics that you mention in your blurb, I wouldn't be surprised if you gathered a following of devotees. Valiant effort! One of the best I've played so far.

It's great to see more turn-based games in the competition, I really like a lot of the ideas in this entry. It has a tenuous connection to the theme and is a bit too easy but it looks great and there is plenty of potential for an amazing game to come out of this. Hope you develop it further.

Interesting game; reminds me of the old Daleks game for early computers. The art is really great. The interface confused me for a while until I got into it; I should have read the info page more closely, but it was not immediately obvious how it worked. Music track is neat-o; nice work!

I'm a big map fan too, always spend ages looking through them when I'm reading a book so I can see exactly where the characters are. Anyway; so was it possible to select movements for all 3 bards and then end the turn, or could you only move 1 bard per turn? Overall I really enjoyed the game, I appreciated the chess aspect and like that you kept it simple